Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements ed. by Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener (review)

Drawn from sixteen papers delivered at the 2015 German Studies Association conference, this five-part volume draws on Christoph Kleßmann's term entanglement in investigating the porous, divisive, and at times continuous national contours between West (FRG) and East (GDR) Germany. Composed of novel works by women and gender scholars, this collection contributes to growing scholarship that re-narrativizes German-German history as one that is both parallel and asymmetrically entangled. Looking to politics, culture, social movements, resistance, sexuality, and the media, this work probes these sites as shaped by gender.

This volume's contributions bring to the surface the multifaceted ways in which East and West German family ideals—and, inherently, gender roles—were ubiquitous and influential; not only did they shape domestic policies, but they often constituted a marker of progress. Whereas the socialist GDR touted the merits of a dual-earner family, its neighbor to the west sought a return to prewar values in promoting the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model. These values are reflected in Jennifer Lynn's chapter, "Entangled Femininities: Contested Representations of Women in the East and West German Illustrated Press of the 1950s," which explores how West German magazines portrayed homemakers as universal, modern women. These depictions contrast with those in East German magazines, in which the female figure, imbued with ideological values, represented the progressive, superior counterpart to that in the West. These competing ideals are echoed in Leonie Treber's chapter, "The Big Cleanup: Men, Women, and Rubble Clearance in Postwar East and West Germany," in which she demonstrates that—in contrast to the widely circulated myth of the "rubble woman" of West Germany—it was in fact predominantly East German women who contributed to clearing rubble; officials in the West instead pursued stabilization of the family unit by returning to the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker model.

Conversely, chapters in this collection highlight a unity between East and West German women in that—despite rhetoric—they all grappled with patriarchal gender norms in their everyday lives. The available avenues in which women were permitted to seek redress and political agency, however, emerged much differently on each side of the Iron Curtain. In "Domestic Abuse and Women's Lives: East and West Policies during the 1960s and 1970s," Jane Freeland explores how women, when confronted with violent home lives, sought rectification within the confines of their respective states. In the FRG, women located this violence as rooted in patriarchal inequality more generally and thematized domestic abuse in the women's movement, culminating in grassroots services and shelters. GDR officials, however, denounced domestic abuse as a capitalist relic antithetical to socialism. Though judges and courts—in addition to workplace collectives and marital-counseling services—condemned violence in the home, the disharmonious marriage became a question of the husband's commitment to socialism—not his propensity for violence. The instrumental power of state ideology in shaping women's rights to equality and citizenship reemerges in Alexandria Ruble's "Children, Church, and Rights: East and West German Protests against Family Law Reforms in the 1950s." Having inherited a 1900 Civil Code that relegated women to second-class citizens in matters of marriage, property, and parenting, both the FRG and GDR sought to reconcile state ideals with church advocacy and demands for reform. East Germany, though having sought immediate reform to fulfill ideological promises of equality, eschewed public conflict and retired reform for ten years. In contrast, reform-minded FRG officials pushed reform through the delegation of a subcommittee in the interest of liberalization.

This volume achieves a tremendous feat in its breadth, though its forte lies in its diverse contexts, uses, and understandings of gender—including its co-constituency with race and sexuality. Though extensive, its impressive scope can at times fall short due to gaps in scholarship—a shortcoming that the editors are transparent in conveying. While the absence of research on...